What business practices do whole-house contractors need to consider adopting in order to see strong growth in the coming year?

Whole-house contracting businesses, which implement comprehensive solutions for performance problems that include a combination of HVAC and building shell improvements, are rare breeds.And successful whole-house contracting businesses are rarer still. But they do exist, and they provide models to live by. To ferret out the secrets of their success, we conducted a survey in mid-2003 of some of these businesses.The survey was conducted in two stages: a broadbased online screening survey with about 120 respondents, followed by detailed phone interviews with 16 selected contractors. (Information on one of the conractors came from public information outside the phone interview.) This work was undertaken as a part of a project funded by the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program to identify best practices and suggest approaches for encouraging retrofit home performance contracting in California. Clarifying Performance The terms “home performance” and “whole-house” are closely related but have distinct differences in meaning to us. Home performance refers to contractors who use performance testing as a part of their business process but do not necessarily complete both ...